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Footwear and shoe brands are discovering the incredible potential of user-generated content (UGC) to create meaningful connections with their fashion-conscious audience.
UGC offers footwear brands a cost-effective way to showcase their products in real-world scenarios. As modern consumers increasingly seek recommendations from fellow customers rather than traditional, branded advertising, this authentic content becomes invaluable for building trust and driving engagement.
User-generated content is transforming how footwear brands market and drive innovation. When customers actively participate through sharing fit experiences, styling inspiration, and comfort reviews, they provide invaluable insights that shape product development.
This feedback loop helps companies create footwear that genuinely addresses consumer needs while fostering a dedicated community of brand advocates.
In this guide, we’ll explore how leading footwear brands have effectively leveraged UGC to enhance their digital presence, build authentic connections, and stand out in an increasingly competitive shoe market. Let’s check some real Footwear brands’ results with UGC.
User-generated content (UGC) has emerged as a really impactful tool for footwear brands, offering innovative ways to address industry-specific challenges while fostering deeper connections with consumers. This content format delivers unique advantages that align perfectly with the needs of modern shoppers:
By leveraging UGC, footwear brands can craft a relatable, inclusive narrative that connects with an array of audiences. It transforms customers into advocates, addresses sizing/comfort hesitations, and showcases products in real-life contexts.
UGC drives engagement, loyalty, and sales in a competitive market. Let’s check some real Footwear brands’ results with UGC.
A major pain point of selling online is that digital photos often don’t do justice to products and so it’s hard for buyers to get the full picture. Especially for online footwear brands, customers are weary of how shoes will look paired with their own outfits. Not to mention size, style, and color.
eCommerce brands try a lot of different tactics to capture how amazing their products are online, but is it enough to convince shoppers to purchase? According to Unisa, customer content is a powerful tool for giving customers access to real-life examples of their products in action. Read the case study on how Unisa benefits from UGC.
“Flowbox offers our customers a visual showcase for exploring our products and finding inspiration. The integration of UGC into our eCommerce allows shoppers to visualize real life examples of our products that they too have purchased or plan on purchasing, while endowing them with a greater value. It also gives customers access to the products in a simple and intuitive way.”
Marta Albors, International Press and PR at Unisa
Your brand can extend this simplicity even further into your online shopping journey by connecting your products directly to authentic UGC. That way, customers go from shopping your brand’s latest street looks to finding the stellar shoes that create them, all in a matter of seconds.
Thanks to this UGC integration with Flowbox platform, Unisa saw a 16.03% increase in conversion rate.
Internationally recognised shoe brand Havaianas sees a lot of online engagement. Havaianas wanted to create a more informative online shopping journey for their customers by enabling them to see what shoes like before they even try them on.
Flowbox has helped Havaianas collect their customers’ posts from social media and seamlessly integrate them into carousels and galleries within their online store, thereby giving customers a realistic sense of how their products look.
Customers no longer have to rely on a professional product shot to get a sense of how well a pair of shoes would suit them – instead, they can browse through customer-created content from social media, getting an authentic view of the products and how they look in the real world, on real people.
‘Today’s consumers want to see real people in brands, and Flowbox enables us to populate our webstore with real life users with our products in a fast and easy way. This real-life, real-time accessibility to images is a great benefit to our online store and social media presence and means we get to showcase our fabulous users looking great, enjoying themselves in Havaianas.”
Merel Werners, Marketing Director EMEIA
The UGC element of Havaiana’s online store helps customers to see what a pair of shoes would really look like on them.
Thanks to UGC, Havaiana’s website showcases a diverse range of people wearing their products, thereby increasing the chance that a potential customer will feel like they can relate to existing followers of the brand and really envision how well products would match their personal wardrobe.
When customers browse product pages, they want to see how footwear looks in real-world settings. While professional product photos are important, Gioseppo found that adding user-generated content to their product pages led to a significant 10.40% increase in sales.
By implementing Flowbox’s UGC platform and running A/B tests on their product pages, Gioseppo was able to show potential customers authentic images of real people wearing their shoes.
This social proof helped build trust and gave shoppers a better understanding of how the footwear would look in everyday situations. Read the case study on how Gioseppo benefits from UGC.
The success of this strategy demonstrates how UGC can drive tangible business results for footwear brands while providing customers with the authentic shopping experience they’re looking for.
By showcasing real customer photos alongside traditional product images, Gioseppo created a more comprehensive and convincing product presentation that directly impacted their bottom line.
Alohas implement a UGC strategy to showcase how their shoes look in diverse lifestyles. UGC helps customers to see all of the different varieties of styling options that they can implement when they purchase a particular kind of shoe.
Customers are encouraged by the brand to share photos and videos of Alohas footwear to inspire future buyers and enhance the brand’s social proof.
Alohas’ UGC strategy turns buyers into contributors. When customers tag the brand in their posts, they’re joining a visible community of wearers. This constant loop of creation and recognition fosters loyalty, as shoppers feel seen and rewarded for their creativity through a feature on the website.
The Flowbox UGC Platform has many great tools and capabilities that can help any Footwear brand, no matter how big or small. Here is an overview of the key platform features:
Flowbox stands out with its sophisticated content collection system that automatically monitors and gathers user-generated content across social media platforms. The system springs into action whenever users mention your brand, tag you in their posts, or use your designated hashtags, ensuring no valuable content slips through the cracks.
The platform’s social media integration capabilities allow your brand to collect content from Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, Pinterest, and other platforms, all from a single dashboard. Check out this collection of articles to see all the platforms you can connect to Flowbox as a source.
Flowbox’s content moderation tools represent a significant advancement in UGC management, combining artificial intelligence with sophisticated quality assessment capabilities. The tool offers comprehensive solutions for brands seeking to streamline their content curation process while maintaining high standards.
The great thing about using Flowbox is that you can send rights requests directly to the users and easily track their responses. Additionally, you can create templates to message the user for a request, and personalise this message however you like.
Once the request is granted, Flowbox’s auto-approve functionality automatically approves the content for use, making the whole process even easier for your team. Check out this article if you want to know more about rights requests and permissions: User Generated Content Permission, Rights, Laws & Legal Issues.
Flowbox’s Smart Tags feature leverages artificial intelligence to streamline content categorisation and moderation. The system automatically identifies key elements within posts and assigns relevant tags, significantly reducing manual moderation time while maintaining accuracy.
This AI-powered system can detect objects, scenes, colours, and even sentiment within content, making it easier to organise and filter large volumes of UGC. The technology also helps identify brand-relevant content and automatically flags potentially inappropriate material, ensuring both efficiency and brand safety.
The Quality Rate tool employs sophisticated AI algorithms to evaluate both technical and aesthetic aspects of user-generated photos. Drawing from a vast database of over 340,000 Instagram images, it assigns scores from 1-100, enabling efficient bulk moderation based on image quality standards.
This scoring system considers factors like lighting, composition, focus clarity, and overall visual appeal to ensure only the highest quality content is selected for brand campaigns.
An effective way to ensure that you’re only collecting content that you want to use is with tools like Blocked Users and Whitelisted Users. These are 2 Flowbox tools that allow your brand to block spam content while giving a green light to content that you know you’ll be interested in seeing.
From there, managing your content is easy, as you just need to approve the images and videos that you would like to appear on your eCommerce.
The advanced Publish feature enables seamless organisation and distribution of user-generated and brand content across multiple platforms. This integration helps maintain a cohesive brand presence while preserving the authentic voice that resonates with audiences.
The tool’s interface allows users to create, customise, schedule, and publish content directly to their social media accounts. Which greatly reduces the time spent by social media managers on planning and shooting content to post manually on a variety of platforms. It can all be done within the Flowbox platform.
Track UGC performance across all channels with comprehensive analytics features, helping you make data-driven decisions about your content strategy. With Flowbox’s Google Analytics 4 integration, you can send analytics events directly from your Flows.
This enables you to monitor user interactions, track conversion paths, and measure the impact of your user-generated content campaigns alongside your other marketing metrics in a single, unified dashboard. Find out more on Flowbox’s advanced website analytics and how you can harness data-driven marketing.
Footwear brands are discovering that a UGC strategy creates powerful connections with style-conscious consumers. From fashion influencers to everyday, casual customers, authentic content from the footwear community has proven to enhance both brand credibility and purchase confidence.
Strategic UGC integration in footwear markets serves several goals: showcasing shoes in real-world environments, highlighting versatility across different styles and occasions, validating comfort and durability through customer testimonials, and nurturing an engaged community.
When brands feature customer styling inspiration, fit reviews, and wear experiences in their marketing, they create a helpful and relatable shopping journey.
By encouraging customers to share their real experiences with comfort, durability, and fit, footwear brands can build a comprehensive resource that helps future shoppers make confident purchasing decisions while strengthening brand loyalty and identity.
Book a demo with Flowbox and we’ll show you how a UGC platform can boost your brand sales.
